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The guard wasn’t the only uncomfortable one. The professor was clearly furious.
Adam hadn’t met the guy back at the capital, like Ellie clearly had. Still, he could easily deduce that Dawson must’ve been involved in whatever had got her tied up and jumping over balconies into Adam’s lap.
The man’s tent was ridiculously over-furnished. There were actualcarpetson the floor, and a tin dinner service sat on the table where a plantain leaf or coconut shell would’ve done perfectly fine.
A trunk of books was open on the floor by the desk. Dawson had apparently brought a library into the bush with him so that it could get infested by termites or turned to a pulp by the damp. From where Adam was standing, he could just make out some of the labels on the spines. They were mostly bound journals and historical tomes on Mesoamerican civilizations, but he also spotted what looked like a novel alongside a well-thumbed volume of the poetry of Robert Burns.
Pleasure reading, Adam deduced.
Every ounce of it would have to be packed up each time they stopped for the night, and then carefully loaded onto the mules in a way that ensured an even distribution of weight… only to be unpacked and set back up again at the end of a long day’s march.
It was crazy.
The disdain Adam felt was clearly mutual. The professor was eyeing him like something foul he’d just realized he had stepped on. Apparently, the thought of having his work corrected by a filthy, unshaven guy in shirtsleeves got the professor’s goat. The notion might have brought Adam a little burst of satisfaction, if he hadn’t also been burning with fury at how he’d been violently blackmailed into doing this.
Ellie. They were going to hurt Ellie.
Miss Mallory, he corrected himself. His mind shied away from the name. He didn’t want to think about the fact that she’d lied to him about who she really was. He wasn’t sure whether it said something about her… or more about what she thought of him.
Maybe she still hadn’t really trusted him—or maybe she just hadn’t felt like he was worth giving her real name to.
Adam squirmed away from all the unanswered questions. He wasn’t going to think about them right now. He had bigger concerns—like trying to figure out how he was going to get both of them out of this alive.
And itwouldbe both of them. Adam wasn’t sure what he’d say to the woman when he finally spoke to her again… but he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave her to the tender mercies of a guy who threatened to cut her up for what more or less amounted tojust business.
Adam couldn’t do much about any of that while he had a gun pointed at his back, no matter how bored the guy with the gun looked. Until he had a chance to make a plan, he needed to suck it up and do what Jacobs had ordered him to do, however much he hated the idea.
He had no doubt that if he didn’t, Jacobs would start hurting Ellie.
“Show me what you’ve got,” Adam ordered.
The professor bristled. He was red-faced from the heat—probably because he was dressed like a Sears catalog advertisement in his khaki field jacket and pith helmet. All of it had blatantly been purchased for the sake of this expedition.
Dawson didn’t wear it well. He looked uncomfortable and kept itching at the skin around his collar.
“I really don’t see how this is necessary.” Dawson glared at Adam from across his desk. “I am a Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Saint Andrews. I am entirely capable of reading some blasted map!”
Adam didn’t bother honoring that with a reply. Instead, he plucked his map canister from Dawson’s hand and turned to the table, which offered more space than the desk once Adam shoved the professor’s excessive dinner setting off to the side. He unrolled the maps across the surface, weighing down the corners with a fork, a knife, a tin mug, and a salt shaker.
At least the idiot hadn’t brought a wine glass.
“Pencil,” Adam ordered, extending his hand.
Dawson gaped at him with outrage, unmoving. Adam sighed and reached back to the desk, snatching a writing implement from the box on the surface. He returned his attention to the maps.
He could feel the professor seething behind him. Eventually, Dawson stomped over to the other side of the table and glowered down at Adam’s work.
The glower turned to an outraged stammer.
“You—you can’t just write all over it!” he protested as he waved his hand over the modern map that Adam had taken from the cylinder.
“It’s my map,” Adam returned easily.
“It is not!” Dawson retorted. “It says it came from the survey office, just like ours. We were expressly told that the map needed to be returned in the exact condition in which it was taken out.”
Adam raised his head to meet Dawson’s eyes.
“It’s my map,” he repeated flatly. He pointed to the unrolled sheet. “I drew it. I can keep drawing it if I want to.”
